A Film Canon

Gigi draws the 1950s musical cycle to a close, distilling its regressive tendencies into a full-blown nostalgia for European class differences, and its Technicolor fetishism into a pornography of aristocratic bodies, spaces, and pursuits. Like most pornography, this makes for a relatively uninteresting artistic experience, with Minnelli's proclivity for the wide-eyed, wondrous gaze of girlhood curbed by Gigi's pragmatism, Lerner and Loewe's score largely rehearsing My Fair Lady, and the actors fairly uninspired - including Maurice Chevalier, who doesn't quite manage to elevate his role as the Ophuls-inspired narrator to the theatrical omniscience required. Even the small idiosyncrasies are left largely undeveloped, including Lerner and Loewe's conversational compositional style, which only rarely settles on Hermione Gingold's peculiar ability to fuse speech and song, the deep reds of Gigi's home, which cry out for the kind of lurid contrast more typical of Minnelli, and the preoccupation with shooting on location, which is generally wasted on texturing the most kitsch moments, culminating with the title song (which also departs from the conversational distance mentioned, as the central couple's - and the viewer's - wry detachment from the aristocratic world is clarified in voyeuristic, rather than critical, terms). As a result, it ultimately works best as an extended piece of production design, rather than a film per se, to which end designer Cecil Beaton ensures that every space is cluttered with precious, fetishistic objects; or, alternatively, as a sheer, efficient, ingenious product, less than the sum of its potentially interesting parts, as if Gigi's objections to marital commodification were the mere counterpoint to that product's charming, irresistible courtship of the Oscars.